


It Always Comes Back to You

by zangetsugirl



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003)
Genre: 50 Sentences, Family Feels, Gen, Leo is my favorite and I'm not ashamed of it, all the family feels, the world loses every single time, the world vs. Leo's family?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 16:44:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20969780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zangetsugirl/pseuds/zangetsugirl
Summary: When the sun sets on his life, there are three things Leo hopes will outlive him:  his brothers, his city and the example of a life lived with honor.





	It Always Comes Back to You

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old, old, old fic, but I've still got a soft spot for it. The prompts came from the 1character community on livejournal, which, afaik, has been dead as a doornail since long before I joined all those years ago. Nonetheless, credit where credit is due.

1.Snow  
Leo has a love-hate relationship with snow; the cold slows him down and the snow itself allows for the death knell of a true ninja—evidence of his passing—but it holds the same simple, elegant beauty of a perfectly executed kata and for that he could never hate it completely.

2.Child  
Leo defines his childhood as carefully as he does everything else, so he knows it ended when he first realized two things: 1) that one day, ninjitsu wouldn't be enough to win and 2) on that day he, as leader, would probably have to choose who wouldn't be coming home.

3.Brick  
Leo knocks a brick—a brick!—out of some random Purple Dragon’s hand and tries not to feel insulted that, after all this time, they still think he’s going to go down easily.

4.Judgment  
Leo will spend the rest of his life trying to earn the trust his family willingly gives him.

5.Powder  
Leo looks at their now flour-covered kitchen and makes a mental note to divide up the household chores so that Mikey and Raph are working on opposite sides of the lair next week.

6.Grim  
“We may not get out of this alive,” he thinks as he plants himself between his unconscious brothers and the ever-growing numbers of the enemy, “but at least we’ll die together.”

7.Trap  
Leo walks into the abandoned warehouse his family is being held in and tells the little voice in his head that’s screaming for him to _run, dammit_ to either say something useful or shut the fuck up, because he’s not walking back out alone.

8.Star  
Sometimes Leo wishes he had super powers like the characters in Mikey’s comics, because when he lies in his bed at night and looks up, all he can see is the ceiling.

9.Possession  
Splinter teaches them to hold tightly to nothing but each other, but Leo has claimed this city for his own and he won’t let anyone hurt it or its people without a fight.

10.Bandage  
Leo wraps a wraps a quickly staining bandage around Don’s arm and thinks about when he learned to do this from Splinter, about the difference between theory and practice.

11.Pearl  
Leonardo walks away from the mouth of the alley, away from the scattered pearls in a pool of blood and promises himself that next time…

12.Glass  
No one who’s lived the life he’s lived can ever be called delicate, so why does he feel like he’s breaking every time he lets them down?

13.Classified  
If the government knew about them, they’d be so classified that their lowly sewer-dwelling selves would never be informed of their own existence; this thought amuses Leo to no end.

14.Buttons  
“Fingers like mine were not made for managing these damn buttons,” Leo grouses as he tries in vain to get dressed in the hated human clothes; April just laughs and comes over to help.

15\. Closet  
After being stuck staring at a part of Casey’s anatomy he _never_ wanted to see for the better part of an hour, Leo vows that he will not allow Mikey to pick their hiding place _ever again_.

16.Ash  
They seem more like phoenixes than turtles some days, the way they rise from the ashes of disappointment and defeat, but Leo knows better; it’s just a matter of time.

17.Definition  
Honor can be defined as “honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions,” and it’s this definition that Leonardo constantly strives to match.

18.Staircase  
Years later, Leo goes back to the burned-out husk of April’s old antique shop and stands on the crumbling staircase; this, he reminds himself, is what happens if he fails again.

19.Nail  
It took three months for Don to calm down enough to turn the hot water back on in the bathroom after Leo hid all his nails in a vain attempt to get him out of the lab.

20.Prey  
By day, Leonardo trains and waits; by night he rises from the sewers like the shadow of death to stalk his prey.

21.Backwards  
Leo is _aware_ that he isn’t personally to blame for every single thing that goes wrong within a hundred mile radius, he just…backslides from time to time.

22.Trouble  
One look at Splinter’s absolutely blank expression in the face of Casey’s redecorating efforts is all it takes to send Leo bolting out of the lair before the coming apocalypse, dignity be damned.

23.Little  
They haven’t been small enough to easily fit all of them into one bed in a long time, and some nights Leonardo still misses that.

24.Collar  
The first time Casey _admits_ to taking April out on a date, Raphael slaps him on the back in congratulations, Michelangelo offers “advice,” Donatello buys flowers to replace the ones ruined by the motorcycle ride and Leonardo takes care of the formalities; he takes Casey off to the side, grabs him by the collar, hauls him in close and growls, “If you ever hurt her, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks.”

25.Circle  
Leonardo sometimes thinks of himself as a secure perimeter keeping his family safe—a solid blue circle forever standing between the ones he loves and anything that might bring them harm.

26.Hands  
Even in sleep with his swords on their stand on the other side of the room, Leo’s hands remain curled as if around the familiar hilts.

27.Freedom  
Leo thinks of Usagi’s world, of walking under the sun like it is his right to do so and recites a few pearls of wisdom to himself—one containing the words “wishes” and “horses”—to keep the tantalizing vision at bay.

28.Last  
Leo has spent all his life training to be a ninja, to be the last one standing; what he’s never learned is what to do if he actually manages it.

29.Scab  
Leo worries at his perceived inadequacies like a child picking at a scab until Don blows something up or Raph and Mikey get in a fight; Leo thinks it’s just as well that he’s in charge of coming up with strategies, because those three aren’t particularly subtle.

30.Crown  
“No, Casey, that’s your—maybe we should just play checkers instead.”

31.Time  
Leo wraps his old bandanas around the hilts of his swords as a reminder, as a way to help his feet find the path again should he become lost.

32.Rice  
The only things that are always in their kitchen are tea, rice and pizza and part of Leo is very thankful that they’re not human enough to get scurvy.

33.Worn  
On nights after one of his brothers is injured in battle, Leo tosses and turns until he gives in and drags himself out of bed to go lean in their doorway and watch them sleep; he never says anything about it to his brothers, so he doesn’t know that they find sleep elusive themselves until they hear his soft footsteps in the hall and the quiet exhale of his breath.

34.Paint  
It’s a little known fact that Leo has never liked cleaning paint off his shell, so when April’s attempted recruiting of the turtles to help paint her apartment goes disastrously awry, she never suspects him at all.

35.Ache  
To Leonardo, the sweetest sensation he’s ever felt is the ache in his muscles after a long, brutal fight.

36.Cherry  
Cherries, like most red things, remind Leo of Raph and, like his brother, he’s never quite sure if he likes them or hates them.

37.Library  
The first time Splinter told them all what a library was, Leo hadn’t believed such a thing existed, but he’d kept that opinion to himself in the face of Don’s rapturous joy.

38.Win  
When he’s feeling particularly uncharitable, Leo looks at his brother tiredly and wonders when he’s going to figure out that there’s no _winning_ in these arguments they keep having, no matter who gets the last word.

39.Loss  
Leo gave up his dreams for himself the day Splinter appointed him leader; the only dreams he kept were for his brothers.

40.Fold  
Though he understands the value of retreat, particularly against insurmountable odds, “give up” is not a strategy Leo will ever endorse.

41.Music  
Leonardo sometimes finds his own words getting in his way of what he wants to communicate, which is probably why he finds himself drawn to the purity of instrumental music.

42.Bell  
Leo crouches in the shadows as he stalks his enemy and waits for the right moment to attack, to explode out of his stillness into deadly motion like a prize fighter waiting for the bell.

43.Sleep  
Leo’s always been a light sleeper; in part, he thinks, because he never takes anything on faith.

44.Contact  
Leo made April tea the first time he met her and her fingers brushed his when he handed her the cup; it was the first time in a long time that he’d touched a human without any hint of violence.

45.Electricity  
The first time Leo held his swords—not the wooden practice swords he’d used up until then, the real things—it was positively electric; _this_, he thought, is what I was waiting for.

46.Milk  
Leo hates the taste of milk, but he’s unable to refuse anything his family gives him as a gift, and they use these two facts to torture him on a semi-regular basis.

47.Wild  
Leo could have been the bad boy, the wild one, but one day Splinter appointed him leader and that moment has defined his life ever since.

48.Expectation  
Leo has always worried about meeting other people’s expectations, but he’s never realized that the highest expectations ever placed on him are his own.

49.Mechanism  
Every now and again Splinter or one of his brothers will try to tell Leo how important he is to their family; he never listens because he knows that he’s just a cog in the machine, that none of them could survive alone.

50.Finale  
When the sun sets on his life, there are three things Leo hopes will outlive him: his brothers, his city and the example of a life lived with honor.


End file.
